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Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

Mark Vonnegut

I’ve been neglecting my blog. I’m writing a lot but it’s mostly journaling. I’ve become a rabid – I mean avid – journaler. There is a new poem about our dog, which I might post later today. And there’s a blog post about the death of focus and deep work in the epoch of screens. But it’s only half done. I keep getting distracted. I think I’m learning, though, that distraction isn’t exactly the problem. It’s an epidemic of addiction to psychological stimulation. The smartphone-enhanced brain of 2019 is constantly seeking the dopamine hit of incoming stuff.

Well, I like that. I’ve never cared for the word “blog,” either. It’s up there with “moist” and
“hangnail” on my list of words unworthy of creative expression on any level. But this website isn’t my journal.

I’ve kept an occasional journal of exceptional events for many years. At some point several years ago, I switched from a fountain pen to a computer. I’ts just not fun, doesn’t draw me in. I prefer pen and paper now. I write in it twice a day, since resuming in earnest last fall. Since Halloween I’ve filled a 240 page notebook and half of another. I write about gratitude, my sleep patterns, my sensations of well being (or unwell), about Being and Time and how hell is mostly other people. Present company excepted, of course.

I’m a big old introvert, so writing time also makes me feel recharged.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

— C.S. Lewis

In my journal, I’m trying to hold on to my life: to people I genuinely care about, to frustrations and celebrations and gifts and sorrows and everything that’s draining away. So it goes.

You?

~~~

Wow. I wrote that then told my Echo to play songs by Moby. This is the first one it played. I kid you not. A kindred thinker.

Let there be a poem now.
Let one appear in the center
of the room, in the air
above the desk, and hang
like a cloud, like a spirit
conjured out of absurdity
and desire. Like a pear
without a tree.
And I will bear
it down and slice and serve
it up, pretending
that it came from me.

As I was working that little poem out of my notebook, I noticed the single unintentional rhyme of pear and bear. I thought about Bear Mind. Not like bear this in mind. Bear Mind. I don’t know where it comes from, if I made it up or heard it somewhere in a poetry reading or a retreat, but it goes something like this:

Imagine you’re sitting in a chair and you have a slice of baloney in your hand. There’s a dog in front of you, watching, and you waive the baloney back and forth. The dog watches the baloney and when you throw it across the room, the dog runs after it. The dog will do this every time. No matter what else the dog might have to look at, listen to, or think about, it’s going after that baloney.

Now imagine it’s not a dog but a bear. You waive the baloney back and forth but the bear is not watching the lunch meat. The bear is watching you, a much larger piece of lunch meat. So when you throw the baloney across the room, the bear doesn’t even blink; he’s not distracted, not even a little. In fact, you may have tossed your last baloney in this world.

I want a mind like that bear. One that stays centered, focused, and doesn’t go chasing after every distracting slice of baloney that gets thrown past his nose. So my goal is to dial back on the inputs of storm and stress, drama and covfefe, that plague my daily existence, and focus on being more mindful, calm, and clear. Building the Bear Mind.

Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.
~Maya Angelou~

“The writer’s job is the job of a clown,
the clown who also talks about sorrow.”
– Kenzaburo Oe

All through the month of February, I had this idea stuck in my head: The Suffering of Things, or The Sorrows of Things. Not the suffering or sorrow of people or of animals, or even of the insensate entities like trees, but of inanimate objects.

There is something here, I think, that’s an important symbol of shared consciousness. Exploring this idea seems a portal into a creative place, so I’m trying to track it down. If we’re going to write about the emotional landscape of humans, it’s important to understand what else – who else – occupies that ground.

When we were young children, we loved certain things so much that they became Real to us in a way that meant something different than merely existent. There were certain toys that became playmates and not just playthings, and which comforted us in a world we were growing to understand. And for many of us who are perhaps more sensitive or sentimental, or in need of such comforting, that tendency has persisted into adulthood.

My ordeal began about the 1st of February. While drinking my morning coffee, I stumbled over a passage from the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

Do you know the story? There’s a good summary on Wikipedia. And you can read the entire text online for free. Essentially, it’s the heartbreaking story of a little boy (unnamed, just called the Boy) who loves his stuffed rabbit, and the toy rabbit who just wants to be loved. It ends sadly, though I suppose that’s subjective.

In this passage, the rabbit asks an older and wiser toy what it takes to be Real, to be loved.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

The rabbit story reminds me of a favorite comic of mine, Calvin and Hobbes, about a boy and his stuffed tiger. When they are alone, the tiger is Real. When anyone else is present, Hobbes looks like a toy.

I thought about these relationships for a long time. And what the Boy and Calvin don’t know – but what the Rabbit and the tiger Hobbes almost certainly know – is that Calvin and the Boy are doomed to grow up anyway.

Dragons live forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant strings make way for other toys.

And then what? What magic remains from the childhood world, for those of us now grown up, pondering death and taxes?

Are there some things that we love so much that our love changes them?

Does our love for them change us?

Do these things suffer, hope, or somehow love us back?

If all of the above or none of the above is true, does it matter?

Of course it matters. I write fiction and poetry. I use metaphors – symbols. The world I inhabit, if not understand, is made as much of spirit and emotion as of earth and sky.

Come to the orchard in Spring
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

— Rumi

I’ve been told that a writer’s – at least a poet’s – job is to observe the suffering of others and take good notes. And we’ve all seen the survivors of great calamity sifting through the rubble and saying things like, “my aunt’s teapot is gone. A million pieces. She was kind and that was all I had of her.”

I think I see. For the child, it’s about imagination and play, and security. For the adult, it’s about memory and love. When I see the quilt my grandmother made for me, I still feel her love. When I wind the clock that my grandpa wound, I remember our bond.

That was the easy part. The next step is: do some of these things have feelings? Can they suffer? Are they Real?

The second part of my pondering ordeal arrived about a week into February. My bother called to say that his pickup truck, which used to belong to me, was dead. He was kind in telling me, knowing that I was sentimental about the truck we called Old Blue. I drove it for almost 18 years. And just a week before, my brother had sent a photo of the odometer as it passed a milestone.

Of course, it’s just a machine, a tool for transportation. But have you ever spent so much time with a thing, covered so many miles, seen so much sun and fog and cold rain and darkness, that the thing seems to take on a life of its own?

We say that some things that mean a lot to us take on a life of their own. I believe, rather, that they take on our life, simply because our life – our capacity to love – seems to overflow. They are with us so long, or have such a connection to meaning and memory, that they become invested with our emotions.

We don’t want to part with them, or throw them in the trash when they lose their shine. They have become Real; more real than a can opener or a DVD player. They have somehow acquired feelings. But not their own feelings, our feelings. Something of our fleeting time – our consciousness of life in the world – is sitting there.

So when I learned about the blown head gasket, etc., I didn’t think, “That’s unfortunate, it was a useful machine.” I thought, “Oh well, he had a good long life, got to see so many roads. So it goes.”

Old Blue will not be missed, not really very much, because it fulfilled its purpose, accomplished its task, and did not die young. But we can’t just let such things go unremembered, just walk away without appreciation and not look back, because they have feelings. Of course things have feelings because we have feelings.

The universe is consciousness. Everything is aware because everything has the feelings we give away. Everything I touch has feelings. The fact that the truck’s feelings are my own seems less important than the fact that the feelings are Real.

Maybe I cast my feelings into the things around me – sparks into the rain – because I’m an introvert and I spend a good deal of time alone with things. So I find consolation in the memories that I find there. Life is memory and memory is fragments. So it goes.

We loan our emotions to the world around us, whether the world likes it or not. We make friends with some of the objects in ours lives because we love the memories they represent, the feelings they conjure. And they have been faithful, which is a consolation in solitude.

Love is everything. Everything is love.

Besides, imagining a long treasured possession as friend is simply fun.

Finally, I’m looking at a little copper elephant that roams about my desk, keeping papers in place. He came from a zoo. I got it when I was – I don’t know – a little kid, and our family went to San Diego on vacation. I like my little elephant very much.

And there is something you love, isn’t there? You have a teddy bear or a doll, propped up among pillows or resting in a dresser drawer. Or a family heirloom; something from the life of a parent or grandparent, an item which mattered to them.

There are people that we love and there are things that we cherish. Perhaps because they connect us to those people, or maybe they connect us with memory.

Sometimes the people we love and miss the most are ourselves; we miss our childhood, our innocence, and our peace. We are trying hard to hold on to a world that is rapidly moving on, becoming more tenuous as we grow older. The empathy of suffering things helps, don’t you think?

What remains is just the most important question I still have:

Is it possible, in the time that I have left, for me to become Real?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here’s some music.

So Many Roads by The Grateful Dead. (And Jerry’s wearing shorts and a blue t-shirt!)

I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I woke up this morning with a line from Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot floating in my thoughts:

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word

I don’t know why. Maybe it was just a bit of dream flotsam, but it was hard to shake the hunch that it was supposed to mean something. Maybe it’s a sticky note from my unconscious mind. So all day long I’ve let it hang there in my peripheral awareness, along with the fact that it’s New Year’s Eve, in hopes of decrypting the meaning.

Now an Eliot scholar might tell us that the larger stanza is a metaphor of the incarnation in the world of God. The divine condescension of Infinity. The Word, as in the first lines of Genesis – a prefigurment of nativity – possibly connoting the repudiation and crucifixion of Christ by an unhearing Mankind. But that’s not why it was buzzing in my brain as I woke up.

By Jove, I think I’ve got it. The whirling, the unstillness – My mind was groping for an image of Time whirling around the center of eternity. Because I have wasted too much time this year. I’ve wasted too much time every year. And it seems to me that time is precious. We should endeavor to avoid wasting it, or allowing others to do so.

Hasn’t it been truly said that there are no ordinary moments? Then let’s make our moments, hours, and days count for all we can in the year to come. Let’s try to spend as few moments as possible almost writing, almost doing, almost loving, not quite living.

And let’s forgive ourselves for not quite living up to that. God is with us and we are loved.